Training for complex situations in human societies such as in education, business transactions, military operations, medical care and crisis management can be provided effectively using serious games and simulations. In these types of games and simulations the role of agents to model and simulate naturally behaving characters becomes more and more important. Especially in situations where the games are not just meant to provide fun, but are used to support the learning process it is important that the games achieve their goal and do not just distract (or entertain) the trainee.

A major aim of this workshop is to discuss how to model rational (or non-rational, but natural) behaving agents who are embedded in a social context with other characters and humans. This is especially important when both characters and humans can be pro-active but also have to react to the behaviour of others in their environment. Thus these characters should have some social conscience of themselves and others and base their decisions for actions on this knowledge. Of course social knowledge may consist of detailed knowledge such as that some person has been your long time friend and thus can be trusted to help you, but also general knowledge such as that society looks bad at people that cheat but adores people that grasp opportunities. Thus we aim to model also different levels of action and interactions. Both the operational ones such as gestures and general way of animating characters, the tactical decisions such as negotiation tactics when trying to get some help and long term strategies such as behaving cooperative towards your boss in order to secure a promotion. One of the interesting questions is how these should be modelled and how they interact? And how do current agent architectures support these models?

In general the technologies used in game engines and multi-agent platforms are not readily compatible due to some inherent differences of concerns. Where game engines focus on real-time aspects and thus propagate efficiency and central control, multi-agent platforms assume autonomy of the agents. And while the multi agent platforms offer communication facilities these can or should not be used when the agents are coupled to a game. So, although increased autonomy and intelligence may offer benefits for a more compelling game play and may even be necessary for serious games, it is not clear whether current multi agent platforms offer the facilities that are needed to accomplish this.

In this workshop we want to bring people together that address the particular challenges of using agent technology for games and simulations in particular for educational contexts.

The workshop will have four main themes:

1. Technical
What techniques are suitable for agents that are incorporated in educational contexts, games and simulations. How to balance intelligence and efficiency? How to couple the agents to the game/simulation and manage this coupling’s information flow? How to deal with the inherent real time nature of the game engine environment? How to couple long and short time interactions?

2. Conceptual
What information is available for the agents' use, either through the educational context, or from the system, through for example, the game or simulation engine? How can reaction to events be balanced with goal directed behaviour? How are ontological differences between information used by agents and information from the domain handled? How do we choose the actions of an agent? Too high level gives little control; too low level makes the agent inefficient.

3. Design
How do we design interactive systems containing intelligent agents? How do we determine what agents should do and should not do, such that local autonomy and story line are well balanced. How do we design the agents themselves that are embedded in other (possibly diverse) systems (including the behaviour authoring tools and methodologies)?

4. Education
It is also important that we introduce both the design and construction of these collaborative autonomous systems into the computer science curriculum and develop ways of encouraging their effective utilisation across the curriculum. Contributions to the workshop will be welcomed that provide a mixture of relevant theoretical and practical understanding of both the teaching and use of multi-agent systems in educational and entertainment research, together with practical examples of the use of such systems in real application scenarios. These will be written for students, teachers, producers, directors and other professionals who want to improve their understanding of the opportunities offered by the use of multi-agent systems in teaching and entertainment scenarios of all types.

The workshop welcomes submissions of original works relevant to the topics described above. This year, the workshop will accept submissions of both full papers (maximum 16 pages, LNCS format) and short papers (maximum 8 pages, LNCS format).

Short papers are encouraged as a mechanism for the timely reporting of interesting but preliminary work, that may not as yet have the level of evaluation or detail that would be expected for a regular paper. The program chairs may, at their discretion, accept papers that were submitted as regular papers as short papers, if the authors have explicitly agreed to this when registering their papers.

All accepted regular papers will receive a slot for oral presentation in the conference. The accepted short papers will serve as the basis for discussions during the workshop. If warranted they may be converted to regular papers for the post-proceedings by incorporating the results of these discussions.

Submissions will be peer reviewed rigorously and evaluated on the basis of adherence, originality, soundness, significance, presentation, understanding of the state of the art, and overall quality of their technical contribution. More details about the review process can be found in the conference page.

The papers should be formatted according to LNCS specification and submitted as PDF files. Instructions and templates can be found at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
Final Papers must be submitted on A4 in PDF format. Your paper should not include page numbers.

All final manuscripts should be uploaded to easychair no later than

Sunday 30th January 2011
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The submission web site is http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=AEGS-11
Submissions violating the formatting guidelines will be excluded from the reviewing process.
At least one author of all accepted papers is expected to attend the Workshop.
All accepted papers will be informally published in the Workshop proceedings, and the organisers intend to organize a LNCS publication of the workshop proceedings.